The Labor Day Group

On SF by Thomas M. Disch http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=124446 The University of Michigan Press, 2005 The Labor Day Group The annuals are out, and here, if we can trust the amalgamated wisdom of our four editors, are the thirty best stories of 1979. It is in the nature of annual reports to pose the question, Was it a good year? and it pains me, as both a shareholder and a consumer, to answer that for science ‹ction, as for so many other sectors of the economy, 1979 was not a good year. Against such a sweeping judgment it may be countered that sf is not a unitary phenomenon nor one easily comparable to the tomato harvest. Sf is a congeries of individual writers, each producing stories of distinct and varying merit. A year of stories is as arbitrary a measure as mileage in painting. Nevertheless, that is how the matter is arranged, not only by anthologists but by those who organize the two prize-giving systems, SFWA, which awards the Nebulas, and Fandom, which gathers once a year to hand out Hugos. The overlap between the contents of the annuals and the short-lists for the prizes is so great that one may fairly surmise that something like cause-and-effect is at work. As the SFWA nominating procedures are conducted in plain view, it seems certain that the editors will keep their eyes open for the likeliest contenders, since the annual that most successfully second-guesses the awards nominees has a clear advantage over its rivals. All this preamble as a caveat to those seeking a buyers’ guide to the supremely best of the three annuals. Each one has its unique excellences (as well as excellences shared with a rival); each, sad to say, includes stories that would be more at home in a workshop than an anthology. What I mean to do is to lump the three annuals together and review the year 1979 in all its annualness, including the awards for short ‹ction. First, some raw data. Not counting overlapping choices, there are thirty stories, by twenty-nine writers, in the three annuals. These include all but one of the short story nominees for the Hugo and the Nebula (the omitted writer is represented by another story) and ‹ve of the ten nominees for novelette. Review of The Best Science Fiction of the Year #9, edited by Terry Carr; Best Science Fiction Sto- ries of the Year, edited by Gardner Dozois; The 1980 Annual World’s Best SF, edited by Don- ald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha; and Timescape, by Gregory Benford. 97 On SF by Thomas M. Disch http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=124446 The University of Michigan Press, 2005 A signi‹cant proportion of the authors of the nominated stories con- stitute a generation unto themselves. George R. R. Martin, Vonda McIn- tyre, Tanith Lee, Jack Dann, Ed Bryant, Michael Bishop, and John Varley were all born between 1945 and 1948 and ‹rst began publishing within two years, either way, of 1971. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia doesn’t have an entry for Orson Scott Card, a multiple nominee, so presumably he came to prominence somewhat later, but my guess, based on internal evi- dence, is that he would belong to this group. These eight, from a total of twenty-nine writers, wrote something better than 40 percent of the total ‹ction wordage in the three annuals, and they have to their communal credit seventeen Hugo and Nebula nominations this year. All of them (except Tanith Lee, who is English) are listed as members of SFWA. Most of them were at Noreascon Two in Boston on Labor Day this year, where I met some of them and didn’t meet others. I don’t mean to suggest that anything like a cabal is at work, only that a coherent generational grouping exists, such as the groupings Malcolm Cowley speaks of in his essay “And Jesse Begat.” Further, I’d suggest that these writers have more in common than those (myself among them) who were lumped together under the rubric “New Wave,” that they pos- sess something approaching solidarity, as the Futurians did in their day. The relative strength of their showing at award time may be accounted for innocently enough by the natural fecundity of writers in their early thir- ties, as well as by the ordinary mechanics of literary careers. Older writers of established reputation tend to devote more of their time and talent to novels. Younger writers are often best able to claim their place in the sun by devoting their best energies to shorter forms and then crossing their ‹ngers at award time. The awards are a serious business. If there were any doubt of that, one need only listen to the testimony of the winners, one of whom, George Martin, in accepting his award this year, spoke of how he’d lusted after a Hugo when ‹rst he’d attended a world convention in the early days of his career. Another, Orson Scott Card, wrote eloquently in a fanzine of his own high regard for the signi‹cance of both awards. Man is a political animal and inclined to pursue self-interest, so it should not be wondered at that in the past, some writers have politicked for these awards with varying degrees of high-mindedness and high- handedness. My reason for noting so much that is common knowledge is not to deplore human nature but to suggest that the work of this latest generation of sf writers—the Labor Day Group, I’d like to call them, since that is when they are most likely to be found all together—has been 98 THOMAS M. DISCH On SF by Thomas M. Disch http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=124446 The University of Michigan Press, 2005 unduly and unnecessarily in›uenced by the clubhouse atmosphere of the sf world and its awards systems. A sense of personal vision is rare in their stories, while a sense of writing to please a particular audience, Fandom, is sometimes obtrusively present—as it was, for me, in last year’s double award-winner, “The Persistence of Vision,” by John Varley. There are solid behaviorist reasons why this might be so. Having served their literary apprenticeships in the sf magazines during the seventies (a decade otherwise notable for disillusionment and retrench- ment), they were witness to the failure of the “New Wave” both as an aes- thetic program (art can’t be brought into existence by manifestos) and commercially. To a reasonably levelheaded apprentice writer it became increasingly clear through the seventies that art was a problematical commodity and that most of what went by that name was claptrap any- how. By contrast a competent entertainment engineer who could guaran- tee production of n-many pages of ‹ctionware might do very well for himself. Look what happened to Star Wars. What the market rewards are simple problems clearly solved by wholesome, likeable characters; ide- ally, the interest of the work should be telegraphable in one sentence: “What if there were a world as big as its orbit round its sun?” “What if snakes were bene‹cent instead of poisonous?” “What if there were Giant Insects?” It was good enough for Grandpa, it was good enough for Grandma, and it’s good enough for the Labor Day Group. If art’s to be part of it, it must be the kind that conceals art, and conceals it well; on the whole, it isn’t worth troubling about. Art, these days, is a branch of the welfare department, and worth maybe ‹ve thousand dollars in an NEA grant. A Hugo can bring in ‹fty thousand dollars on the next paperback contract. Some cases in point, from this year’s crop of Labor Day Group stories: Ed Bryant’s (or bryANT’s) “giANTS” (in the Dozois annual) is about giant ants, like in the movie Them, only different. There are these ants in South America, see, that are really scary and they’re heading this way, and here’s bryANT’s twist—we defeat the ant invasion by inducing immoder- ate growth, since beyond a certain size exoskeletons are dysfunctional. I remember encountering the same observation some years ago in a book of essays by Arthur Clarke, and I’m sure the idea wasn’t original to him. Bryant dramatizes this common knowledge by having someone unaware of it informed of it, after much cajoling, by someone in the know—gen- erally, and in this case, a poor sort of drama, since by a simple shift of point of view the story is reduced to the bare notion one already knows. Inexplicably, “giANTS” won a Nebula. Congratulations. The Labor Day Group 99 On SF by Thomas M. Disch http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=124446 The University of Michigan Press, 2005 The winner of the Hugo for short story, George R. R. Martin’s “The Way of Cross and Dragon,” appears in both the Dozois and Wollheim/Saha annuals. Though full of a good deal of incidental sf invention (droll aliens, pretty planets), the dramatic structure is like that of “giANTS,” but the idea being ferreted out by the protagonist is both more original and full of resonance. Martin contends that all supernat- ural religions are the result of someone’s decision to tell a whopping lie, a contention that deserves ampler and more serious treatment than it receives here. Were it set in 100 A.D.

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